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 NEW YORK (AP) - Zimbabwe's government is intimidating, arresting and beating lawyers in an attempt to destroy the beleaguered political opposition's last line of defense, one of the country's leading attorneys said Wednesday.
Although President Robert Mugabe's security forces have roughed up lawyers for years, the mistreatment has increased in recent weeks with the arrests of four prominent attorneys, said Arnold Tsunga, the executive director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.
Lawyers who protested two of the arrests by demonstrating outside the country's high court on Tuesday were manhandled and struck with riot batons, according to witnesses and the Zimbabwe Law Society. Some were forced into a truck, taken to a suburban field and beaten, they said.
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